SHOW-NOTES

From Cold War Terror to Algorithm Anxiety In 1983, 100 million Americans watched "The Day After" and couldn't sleep for days. Today, a 13-year-old Russian boy thinks he's playing a video game but is actually designing drone components for Ukraine. We've traded the fear of instant nuclear annihilation for the reality of constant algorithmic surveillance and precision warfare.

The Drone Revolution Changes Everything Ukrainian soldiers call it "a thousand snipers in the sky." Drones now cause 70% of battlefield casualties - more than all traditional weapons combined. Ukraine destroyed $7 billion in Russian aircraft using cheap AI-guided drones, and both countries plan to produce millions more in 2025.

Silicon Valley Joins the War Machine Tech companies have completely reversed course on military contracts. Google dropped its weapons ban, Meta trains soldiers with VR, and four tech executives were sworn in as Army officers. Defense venture capital surged 33% to $31 billion as Silicon Valley discovers the profit in algorithmic warfare.

The Environmental Cost Global militaries would rank as the world's 4th largest climate polluter. Modern wars create "ecological dead zones" - reducing elephant populations 90% in some areas and killing thousands of dolphins with sonar. As Yuval Harari warns, we're becoming "hackable animals." The question isn't whether we can build smarter weapons, but whether we're smart enough to build a better world.

A CALL TO ACT: The World's Most Comprehensive Database of Eco-Solutions

TRUMPING TRUMP: A new survival guide for maintaining focus and sanity while avoiding outrage fatigue. TT is a database of 300+ strong organizations, many with local chapters in your area, united together to fight against the insanity spewing out of ‘The Whiter House’ that is going to be with us for years.

Because real change happens through sustained action, not endless reaction.

Episode Webpage: Packed with organizations Waging Peace.

The Quintessential Question – Why is the Human Brain so Extraordinary?

Fire made us human through cooking, giving us the energy to build massive brains and create civilization. But the species that mastered fire has lost control of it, choosing short-term politics over long-term survival as our world burns.

We're systematically building disaster through poor development choices and human carelessness while refusing to use proven solutions. The tools exist to prevent catastrophic fires, but political will does not.

The hidden cost is staggering: trillions of creatures dying in silence as entire ecosystems collapse. While other targeted groups can recover from political attacks, environmental destruction is permanent. The current administration's environmental rollbacks will echo across centuries, making America a fossil fuel backwater as other nations capture the clean energy future.

A CALL TO ACT: A Comprehensive On-line Database of Eco-Solutions

"TRUMPING TRUMP" Database for the New American Resistance Revolution

Fire has transformed from the simple chemistry Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman once described—oxygen and carbon atoms finding their way home to each other—into something far more sinister. When modern cities burn, we're not just breathing smoke; we're inhaling aerosolized communities filled with toxic chemicals from synthetic furnishings, electronics, and household products that can kill more people indirectly than the flames do directly.

This transformation has reshaped human life in fire-prone regions. Childhood summers have become seasons of hazards spent indoors checking air quality indexes. Families face impossible choices between staying in increasingly dangerous places or joining the largest climate-driven migration in human history. Those who lose everything describe their lives split into "before and after"—a psychological cleaver that fundamentally alters their sense of home and safety.

Meanwhile, we're systematically poisoning the 40,000 Americans who fight these fires. While other countries provide respirator masks, the U.S. Forest Service continues sending firefighters into toxic smoke with only bandannas or nothing at all. Young firefighters are developing cancer, heart disease, and lung damage, yet the institution they serve denies them basic protection while abandoning them when illness arrives.

Perhaps most troubling is how media coverage fails to help the public understand what's happening. Only 30% of fire stories mention climate change, and just 6% explain that fires pump carbon into the atmosphere. This leaves people confused about why fires are becoming more frequent and toxic, missing the connections necessary to demand appropriate responses to a crisis that requires unprecedented action.

A CALL TO ACT: A Comprehensive On-line Database of Eco-Solutions

"TRUMPING TRUMP" Database for the New American Resistance Revolution

For thousands of years, humans and fire had a deal. Fire exists because of the oxygen generated by life. Civilization exists because it partnered with fire. Fire had co-evolved with Life.

We carried fire to new places, fire gave us power to reshape the world. That ancient partnership made civilization possible—and breaking it may destroy us.

The fires burning today aren't the fires our grandparents knew. They're faster, hotter, and more destructive than anything in recorded history. Forest fires that once burned every few years now explode into crown fires that kill everything. Grass fires race through suburbs faster than people can flee. Lightning-fast fuel conversion turns safe landscapes deadly in hours.

How did we get here? A century of fire suppression broke nature's "herd immunity"—turning forests from parklike landscapes into overgrown tinderboxes. Climate change loaded the dice for extreme fire weather. Now we live in what fire historian Stephen Pyne calls the "Pyrocene"—a fire age replacing the ice ages.

The ancient contract that made us human has become a Faustian bargain. We gained incredible power but lost the balance that kept fire manageable. Now fire is writing the rules. Learn how we need to toss all we thought about how fire use to work, and how we can play by those new rules.

A CALL TO ACT: A Comprehensive On-line Database of Eco-Solutions

"TRUMPING TRUMP" Database for the New American Resistance Revolution

How should we think about a world that doesn’t yet exist?
Can you Imagine what a Post-carbon Future would look like?

For decades, visions of possible climate futures have been thought of, on the one hand, Pollyanna-like faith that normality would endure, and on the other, an ecological end of days, during which perhaps billions of lives would be devastated or destroyed.

It’s difficult to know where you are going if you don't have a clear vision of what the future should look like, in particular, a positive vision that you could get excited about and motivated to really make a transformative change.

Polling suggests that people are much more likely to act when future scenarios are placed in a positive light, emphasizing terms such as “resilience,” “sustainability,” and “nature-based solutions”.

It is important for us to share an encouraging narrative, one where we think and then act on those positive, yet realistic solutions — without downplaying the dire implications of climate change.

While we cannot stop global warming overnight, we can slow the rate and limit the staggering amount of carbon we flood the atmosphere with every day.

If all human emissions of heat-trapping gases were to stop today, Earth’s temperature would continue to rise for a few decades as ocean currents bring excess heat stored in the deep ocean back to the surface. Once this excess heat radiated out to space, Earth’s temperature would stabilize.

Podcast Episode

Most people are not climate deniers. It is an unreasonable and frankly, a stupid position to take.
Recent polling shows that the majority (73%) of Americans strongly believe that climate change is happening and that it is caused by humans. You would think that with that much agreement, we would vote in politicians with similar convictions. But we don't. Why? Could Everyday Denial, the denial that virtually every one of us engages in multiple times a day, be even a greater threat than climate denial? In the United States, we have the largest and most influential group of climate deniers the world has ever seen. They are single handedly the greatest threat to human civilization and to life on earth as we know it. Who are they? Could there be a more immediate hazard to our global environment than climate change itself?

Tune in to find the explanations, and more importantly, the answer to what you can do about it.

EPISODE 10 WEBPAGE

A CALL TO ACT: A Comprehensive On-line Database of Eco-Solutions

"TRUMPING TRUMP" Database for the New American Resistance Revolution

From Colorado's Blue Lakes Trail limiting hikers to 40 per day, to Bhutan charging tourists $200 daily just to exist in the country, this episode explores the uncomfortable truth about environmental protection: the solutions that actually work all involve saying NO. We examine successful tourism limits from the Galápagos Islands to Antarctica, revealing how permits, quotas, and fees are preserving ecosystems while mass tourism destinations collapse under their own popularity. The evidence is overwhelming—places like Thailand's Maya Bay and Mount Everest show what happens when we prioritize unlimited access over protection.

But here's the breakthrough insight environmentalists are missing: tourism limits have broader political support than almost any other environmental policy. Even people who oppose carbon taxes will fight to protect their favorite hiking spots from overcrowding. Tourism restrictions work politically because the problem and solution are both visible and immediate—unlike abstract climate policies, everyone understands not wanting paradise destroyed by crowds. This could be our gateway to normalizing environmental protection that actually requires limits on consumption.

The episode reveals how accepting permits for wilderness areas could lead to accepting limits everywhere else. From Hawaii's new green fees funding climate adaptation to the Netherlands' A-E scoring system for flights, tourism policy is quietly teaching people that environmental protection requires sacrifice. We're not just saving hiking trails and coral reefs—we're changing how people think about growth, limits, and what's worth protecting. Tourism restrictions could be the trojan horse for climate action that actually works.

A CALL TO ACT: Comprehensive Database of Eco-Solutions

TRUMPING TRUMP Database for the New American Resistance Revolution

Episode Webpage

Episode 36: Touching on Similar Themes —
1. Should we give the planet a break and not travel so much?

2. The Rich Are to Blame for the Climate Crisis

SHOW NOTES

Flight shame is dead. Despite a brief pause during COVID, global aviation emissions hit record highs in 2024 and are projected to double by 2040. What makes this different from other climate issues? The staggering inequality. The richest 1% of people are responsible for 50% of aviation emissions, while 80% of the world's population has never even been on an airplane. Think of it this way — every cross-country flight melts a grave-sized chunk of Arctic ice, yet we have half a million people in the air at any given moment worldwide.

The technology promises are mostly fantasy. Sustainable aviation fuels account for less than 0.1% of current fuel use. Electric planes can barely carry four passengers 100 miles. Hydrogen requires massive amounts of renewable electricity we don't have. What that means is the aviation industry uses future tech promises to justify present-day expansion — like a tobacco company promising healthy cigarettes by 2050 while doubling production. The uncomfortable truth?Even with miraculous breakthroughs, emissions will still double because flight growth outpaces any efficiency gains.

Here's what really gets disturbing — the psychology of justification reveals why we're failing at climate action. People rationalize flying with cultural exchange arguments, bogus carbon offsets, and business necessity claims. Consequently,we've created "last chance tourism" where people fly to Antarctica to see climate change before contributing more to climate change. The big lesson for us? If wealthy people won't give up vacation flights — literally the easiest climate action to take — what hope do we have for the harder stuff like decarbonizing agriculture or manufacturing?

GOING JET-FREE: Alternatives to Flying

A CALL TO ACT: Comprehensive Database of Eco-Solutions

Trumping Trump

Episode Webpage